Archive for the ‘research’ Category

While trying to update rcdk on CRAN it was pointed out to me that usage of the library resulted in modifications to the users home directory. Specifically, this occurred when generating InChI‘s. The CDK makes use of jni-inchi, which in turn depends on JNATI which enables Java code to work with native libraries in a platform independent fashion. As part of this, it creates $HOME/.jnati – which is a no-no for CRAN packages. To resolve this, the latest version of rcdklibs excludes the InChI module and its dependencies. Hopefully rcdk and rcdklibs will now pass CRAN QC.

To access InChI functionality in R you can use the rinchi package which is hosted on Github. Since it will modify the users home directory, it cannot be hosted on CRAN. However, it’s easy enough to install

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library(devtools)
install_github("cdkr", "rajarshi", subdir="rinchi")

Importantly, if all you need is to go from SMILES to InChI, there is no need to install rcdk as well. So the following works

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inchi <- get.inchi('CCC')
inchik <- get.inchi.key('CCC')

But if you do have a molecule object obtained via rcdk, you can also pass that in to get an InChI or InChI key representation.

I recently came across a paper by Yilancioglu et al that described a method to predict drug synergies using only lipophilicity. In effect, it claimed to predict synergy based purely on a physicochemical property and independent of target or pathway information. Their results suggest that

combinations of two lipophilic drugs had a greater tendency to show drug synergy

I must admit that I’m skeptical of this claim. While lipophilicity certainly plays a role in a drugs effect (and thereby a drug combinations’ effect), I’m not sure that lipophilicty is a primary driver of a synergistic interaction. Rather, lipophilicity might be a prerequisite; that is, if two molecules cannot enter the cell to access their target(s), they’re unlikely to exhibit synergy!

The paper considered a set of 175 (anti-fungal) drug pairs tested in yeastand evaluated molecular weight, logP, H-bond donor and acceptor counts and also computed a synergicity, that is a measure of how frequently a drug exhibits synergy with other drugs. So the work isn’t really directly capturing synergy (which was measured using the Loewe model). They they compute Spearman correlation between the synergicity and the various physicochemical properties – identifying logP as the one with a statistically significant, though moderate correlation (though one of their examples presents a significant correlation of 0.2 – not a whole lot you could do with that!). They then go on to build a decision tree model that predicts synergicity surprisingly well, though given that the model is based on a synergy netowrk (nodes are drugs, edges are weighted by the synergy between a pair of drugs), it’s not clear how they evaluated the lipophilicity of a drug pair. The terminology was a bit confusing – sometimes using synergicity and sometimes synergy. It’s definitely a surprising result – but is it really meaningful? As I note above, I find it difficult to accept lipophilicty as a proximal driver of synergy. The fact that one of their analyses employs binned logP could raise an issue (see a presentation or this paper on the dangers of binned data).

Given that NCATS has developed a high throughput compound combination screening platform, I was interested in seeing if any of this held up on some of our public datasets. I considered a dataset of 466 drugs tested in combination (6×6 matrix) with Ibrutinib. Thus, in contrast to the Yilancioglu et al paper, one member of the combinations is constant. As a result, it makes sense to correlate the logP of the other (i.e., non Ibrutinib) component of the combination to the synergy value of that combination. I evaluated logP of the compounds using ChemAxons cxcalc tool and compared the values to the various synergy metrics we calculate (see here for definitions).

The figure above pretty much shows no correlation for any of the synergy metrics (and Spearmans ρ was ≅ 0 with p > 0.05). I also repeated the calculation of a set of 1912 combinations (i.e., 1912 compounds combined with Ibrutinib) and got essentially the same result. Granted that this was on a single lymphoma cell line (TMD8) which is significantly different from the environment considered by the authors and that our synergy metrics are different from those described in the paper. So, it might just be a feature of anti-fungal drugs?

But interestingly, when we considered binned logP values and look at the median value of a synergy metric in each logP bin, we do see a trend – at least for two out of four metrics. But given the scatter plots, where the variability is not hidden, is this really meaningful?

So overall, the paper presents some surprising observations but is a little unsatisfying from an explanatory point of view. And the conclusions don’t seem to translate to other datasets.

A few of my recent projects have involved the use of MongoDB, primarily for the ease afforded by a schemaless environment. Sometime back I had investigated the use of MongoDB to store chemical structure data, though those efforts did not actually query structures per se; instead they queried for precomputed numeric or text properties. So my interest was piqued when I came across a post from Datablend that described how to use the aggregation framework to perform similarity searching using fingerprints. Specifically their approach employs an integer representation for fingerprints – these can represent bit positions or hash codes (for path based fingerprints). Another blog post indicates they are able to perform similarity searches over 30M molecules in milliseconds. So I was interested in seeing what type of performance I could get on a local installation, albeit with a smaller set of molecules. All the data and code to regenerate these results are available in the mongosim repository (you’ll need to unzip fp.txt for the loading and profiling scripts).

I extracted 1M compounds from ChEMBL v17 and used the CDK to evaluate the Signature fingerprint. This resulted in 993,620 fingerprints. These were loaded into MongoDB (v2.4.9) using the simple Python script

I then used the first 1000 fingerprints as queries – each time looking for the compounds in the database that exhibited a Tanimoto score greater than 0.9 with the query fingerprint. The aggregation pipeline is shown in profile.py and is pretty much the same as described in the Datablend post. I specifically implement the bounds described by Swamidass and Baldi (which I think Datablend also uses, but the reference seems wrong), allowing me to first filter on bit counts before doing the heavy lifting. All of this was run on a Macbook Pro with 16GB RAM and a single core.

The performance was surprisingly slow. Over a thousand queries, the median query time was 6332ms, with the 95th quantile query time being 7599ms. The Datablend post describing this approach indicated that it got them very good performance and their subsequent post about their Similr service indicates that they achieve millisecond query times on Pubchem sized (30M) collections. I assume there are memory tweaks along with sharding that could let one acheive this level of performance, but there don’t appear to be any details.

I should point out that NCATS has already released code to allow fast similarity search using an in-memory fingerprint index, that supports millisecond query times over Pubchem sized collections.

UPDATE (3/21) – I was contacted by the author of the paper who pointed out that my analysis was based on a misunderstanding of the paper. Specifically

The primary goal of WES is to identify actives – and according to the authors definition, the most interesting actives (that should be ranked highly) are those that have no dose response and show a constant activity equal to the positive control. Next in importance are compounds that exhibit a dose response. Finally the least interesting (and so lowest ranked) are those that show no dose response and are flat at the negative control level.

The WES method requires that data be normalized such that DMSO (i.e., negative control) is at 0 and positive control is at 100%.

Since my analysis was based on the wrong normalization scheme the conclusions were erroneous. When the proper normalization is taken into account, the method works as advertised in that it correctly ranks compounds that show constant activity at the positive control level at the top, followed by curves with a dose response and finally with inactives (no activity at all) at the bottom.

Based on this I’ve updated the figures and text to correct my mistake. However, in my opinion, if the goal is to identify compounds that have a constant activity one does not need to go to entropy. In addition, for the case of compounds with a well defined dose response, the WES essentially ranks them by potency (assuming a valid curve fit). The updated text goes on to discuss these aspects.

UPDATE (2/25) – Regenerated the enrichment curves so that data was ranked in the correct order when LAC50 was being used.

I came across a paper that describes the use of weighted entropy to rank order dose response curves. As this data type is the bread and butter of my day job a simple ranking method is always of interest to me. While the method works as advertised, it appears to be a rather constrained method and doesn’t seem to do a whole let better than simpler, pre-existing approaches.

The paper correctly notes that there is no definitive protocol to rank compounds using their dose response curves. Such rankings are invariably problem dependent – in some cases, simple potency based ranking of good quality curves is sufficient. In other cases structural clustering combined with a measure of potency enrichment is more suitable. In addition, it is also true that all compounds in a screen do not necessarily fit well to a 4-parameter Hill model. This may simply be due to noise but could also be due to some process that is better fit by some other model (bell or U shaped curves). The point being that rankings based on a pre-defined model may not be useful or accurate.

The paper proposes the use of entropy as a way to rank dose response curves in a model-free manner. While a natural approach is to use Shannon entropy, the author suggests that the equal weighting implicit in the calculation is unsuitable. Instead, the use of weighted entropy (WES) is proposed as a more robust approach that takes into account unreliable data points. The author defines the weights based on the level of detection of the assay (though I’d argue that since the intended goal is to capture the reliability of individual response points, a more appropriate weight should be derived from some form of variance – either from replicate data or else pooled across the collection) . The author then suggests that curves should be ranked by the WES value, with higher values indicating a better rank.

For any proposed ranking scheme, one must first define what the goal is. When ranking dose response curves are we looking for compounds

According to the paper, a key goal is to be able to identify compounds that show a constant activity – and within such compounds the more interesting ones are those that have constant activity = 100%. While I disagree that these are the most interesting compounds, it is not clear why one would need an entropy based method to identify such constant-activity curves (either at 100% or 0%).

More generally, for well defined dose response curves, the WES, by definition, tracks potency. This can be seen in the figure alongside that plots the WES value vs the log AC50 for a set of 27 good quality curves taken from a screen of 1408 AR agonists. Granted, when no model can be fit, one does not have an AC50, whereas a WES can be evaluated. But in such a case it’s not clear why one would necessarily want to quantify presumably noisy data.

However, going along with the authors definition, the method does distinguish valid dose responses from inactives (though again, one does not require entropy to make such a distinction!) as shown in the adjoining figure. It is clear from the definition of WES that a curve that is flat at 100% will exhibit the maximum value of WES and so will always rank high.

One way to to test the performance of ranking methods this is to take a collection of curves, rank them by a measure and identify how many actives are identified in the top N% of the collection, for varying N. Ideally, a good ranking would identify nearly all the actives for a small N. If the ranking were random one would identify N% of the actives in the top N% of the collection. Here an active is defined in terms of curve class, a heuristic that we use to initially weed out poor quality curves and focus on good quality ones. I defined active as curve classes 1.1, 1.2, 2.2 and 2.1 (see here for a summary of curve classes).

As pointed out by the author during our conversation, this is not an entirely fair comparison – since my scheme does not consider a flat curve at 100% as active. Though it’s a valid point, the dataset I worked with did not have any such curves. More generally, such curves would be the exception in a qHTS screen (assuming the concentration ranges have been correctly chosen). From that point of view, one should be able to apply WES to generate a ranking for any qHTS screen otherwise one would have to inspect the curves first to ensure that it contains such “flat actives” and then apply WES. Which is not the right way to go about it.

As shown in the enrichment plot shown alongside (generated for the 1408 compound AR agonist dataset), WES works better than random (and much better than the standard Shannon entropy), but is still outperformed by the area under the dose response curve (AUC) and potency. I certainly don’t claim that AUC is a completely robust way to rank dose response curves (in fact for some cases such as invalid curve fits, it’d be nonsensical). I also include LAC50, the logarithm of the AC50, as a ranking method simply because the paper considers it a poor way to rank curves (which I agree with, particularly if one does not first filter for good quality, efficacious curves).

There are a few other issues, though I think the most egregious one was that the method was tested on just one dataset. I’m not convinced that a single dataset represents a sufficient validation (given that Tox21 has about 80 published bioassays in PubChem). But that’s a case of poor reviewing rather than a technical flaw.

With the profusion of chemical information on the web – in the form of chemical names, images of structures, specific codes (InChI etc), it’s sometimes very useful to be able to seamlessly retrieve some extra information while browsing a page that contains such entities. The usual way is to copy the InChI/SMILES/CAS/name string and paste into Pubchem, Chemspider and so on.

However, a much smoother way is now available via a Firefox extension, called NCATSFind, developed by my colleague. It’s a one click install and once installed, automatically identifies a variety of chemical id codes (CAS number,InChI, UNII) and when such entities are identified uses a variety of backend services to provide context. In addition, it has a cool feature that lets you select an image and generate a structure (using OSRA in the background).